The Online Newspaper of Education Rights
Current Edition: September 2021
After Confronting the School Board
...Next Steps
From Virginia to Texas to Nebraska, parents and legislators are taking their state and local school boards to task for replacing substantive academics with Critical Race Theory (CRT), comprehensive sex education (CSE) and other woke curricula, forced masking, and an overall failure to teach essential skills.
In Virginia, one school board actually responded favorably to parents' demands that the district's radical comprehensive sex education program be rejected. Unlike Virginia's Loudoun County School Board, which has repeatedly thwarted parents' efforts to remove offensive propaganda from district classrooms, the Russell County board voted unanimously to honor the will of parents by rejecting the sex ed rules, despite threats from the Virginia Department of Education.
Classical Education Renewal: Will it Save America?
Jeremy Wayne Tate, educator and CEO of Classic Learning Test, recently told Phyllis Schlafly Eagles President Ed Martin: "A renewal movement is happening with people returning to the classics, returning to the great traditions, the tried and true." A guest on Martin's weekly Pro America Report, Tate added: "I think people are sick and tired of [public education] experimenting on our kids, and so we're seeing this return in the homeschool world, the Christian school world, the Catholic school world, and the charter school world. They're reintroducing classical education and it's starting to go national."
In response to Martin's fear that we have lost a couple of generations to destructive fad teaching, Tate agreed that "we've slipped away from the basics." He pointed out that testing companies dictate content, and that these companies today are radical.
MoreClassical Strides in Colorado
The state of Colorado boasts a number of classical schools. In Colorado Springs, the Chesterton Academy of Our Lady of Walsingham opened its doors in August, the newest member of the Minneapolis-based [G.K.] Chesterton Schools Network. Three of the 34 Chesterton schools are operating in Colorado — two are located in the Denver area — and these offer a "substantive classical education" that includes authentic Catholic teaching.
Walsingham’s Headmaster, Mark Langley, has a long history of involvement in classical education. A graduate of the first classical Catholic school in the U.S., Trivium School, founded in Lancaster, Massachusetts in 1978, Langley is a force in classical education renewal. In an interview with Education Reporter, he said: "There is a compelling need to return to this type of education, the study of Latin and Greek, the Great Books of the Western World, and the writings of the great authors."
MoreSummer: No Vacation from CRT
In August, the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) offered a Critical Race Theory Summer School called "Forbidden Knowledge," co-sponsored by the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies. The five-day online course promoted CRT and vilified CRT's opponents, meaning anyone who questions or debunks its divisive and historically inaccurate narrative. While readers may assume this type of course is new, some semblance of it was taught as far back as 1989.
Targeted attendees for the course were "students, practitioners, and stakeholders" of CRT and "intersectionality," an invented term with a complex definition that many find incoherent, but that could be construed to mean the leveraging of every victim group the left uses to destroy America. More than 50 speakers and presenters gave their two cents at the conference.
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Book Reviews
Old Abe
by John Cribb,
Republic Book Publishers, 2020
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Briefs
- With homeschooling on the rise as well as defections from public schools for other educational alternatives, school districts are instituting efforts to lure students back. Homeschool numbers show no sign of dropping off and public schools are scrambling to stop the bleeding as tax dollars decline with every lost student. Nationwide, districts are reporting lagging enrollment. This summer, Colorado's Adams 14 School District north of Denver initiated a $43,500 advertising campaign to attract students using billboards.
- A Fairfax County, Virginia public school promoted videos called "Woke Kindergarten 60 Second Texts" for a second-grade summer learning program. The Bailey Elementary School for the Arts posted one of the videos — "Safe," by Ki — on its website, then promptly removed it when a whistleblower called attention to it. The video advances CRT themes under the guise of reassuring kids that "we all deserve to feel safe."
- Wisconsin's Gateway Technical College has a message for interested Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) scholarship students: White males need not apply. SC Johnson, "The Family Company," offers a scholarship program called the SC Johnson STEM Scholarship Program at Gateway, which has a total value of $45,000 after four years. This means scholarship recipients are awarded $7,500 for each of their two years at the technical college, then $7,500 for each of two additional years after they transfer to a four-year college or university.
- The Independent Women's Forum says today's freshman orientation "serves as a crash-course on how to navigate the politically correct halls of higher education, where words are violence, gender is a choice, and all whites are racist." The Women's Forum published five lies colleges and universities teach freshman students before they even step foot in a classroom. Lie #1: "White privilege is real." Skin color is the most important factor about a student and "white, male Christians have it the easiest in life while all others are oppressed in some way." More
Be Our Guest:
Contributing Author Essays
My University Sacrificed Ideas for Ideology. So Today I Quit.
The more I spoke out against the illiberalism that has swallowed Portland State University, the more retaliation I faced.
I'm writing to you today to resign as assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University.
Over the last decade, it has been my privilege to teach at the university. My specialties are critical thinking, ethics and the Socratic method, and I teach classes like Science and Pseudoscience and The Philosophy of Education.
by Peter Boghossian
Originally published in the Substack "Common Sense with Bari Weiss." Reprinted by permission.
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